Science, always looking for new ways to help you forget your painful past, has recently discovered that drinking alcohol mixed with diet soda will get you drunk faster than drinking it with other types of mixers. Sure, there's something a bit less tragically poetic about staring into a glass of whisky and Diet Coke, but, as the old adage goes, wino beggars can't be choosers.

According to the study published in a journal called Alcoholism (no, the irony isn't lost on us), the lack of sugar in diet sodas accelerates alcohol's absorption into the blood stream. More sugary drinks, on the other hand, act almost like a meal and delay stomach emptying and alcohol absorption. And it's not just a matter of the subjects who drank diet soda drinks being slightly drunker than those who didn't. Says researcher Cecile A. Marczinski, "Participants who drank diet soda with vodka had blood alcohol contents as high as 18 percent more than when sugar-containing mixers were used."

If you care about health, which you probably should, it's important to realize that heavy alcohol consumption is much more harmful over time than calorie consumption (plus, most alcohol has a lot of calories, so double whammy). But if you prefer to get quickly destroyed (no judgments — I'm drunk on cough syrup right now), diet soda might be the way to go. All you have to do is work up the courage to ask the bartender for the always-humiliating "vodka and diet."

Ugh, never mind. Just drink scotch and Robitussin like a real woman already.